You can see it as a ship in a giant bottle. After 50 years of exhibition in a dry dock, the 135-year-old Greenwhich racing tea clipper begins to fall apart. For this piece of history, a little youth bath would be very welcomed. But restoring the structure is a dilemma. Whether it’s kept out of public sight, whether its surroundings get 3 kilos of dust and smokes a day during the operation.
Sir Nicholas Grimshaw and his five partners brought “the” idea: They will be building an inflatable structure that envelopes the boat, and keeps its design by merely replicating the shape of a sailing boat.
The bubble is about 76 meters high. Walls of the shipyard are sustained by Swiss-invented “Tensarity” structural system of rigid pneumatic beams, as reports Hugh Pearman for the Sunday Times (via vestal).
Now imagine how could we reuse this kind of technology for more residential purposes. Imagine what kind of inflatable shelters we could rapidly build for natural disaster victims. Or how giant trees we could temporary enclose in a anti-pollution bubble? Isn’t that neat? What do you think?
Living in the Whine Country » A ship in a bottle: The future of inflatable architecture – October 27, 2006
[…] [Cocolico] […]
Cocolico — Norman Foster plants his tent in Kazakhstan – January 16, 2007
[…] Above all those features, such a project shows how possible it is now to create big structures, with light and low-environment impact. The envelope of the structure is made of ETFE, a bubble-like polymer that is used for harsh environment and could be transparent. And as we already saw for the Greenwich racing clipper, designing a envelope is a lot cheaper than a pure metallic structure. […]